by Jane Gardam
When we got out—Aunt Mary in her nursing robes as usual—he stopped his work on his teeth but began scratching about at his behind, then ambled forward and stood, uncertain what to do, in his satin breeches. Aunt Mary said, ‘Lady Vipont? Miss Younghusband and Miss Polly,’ and while he thought what to do next there appeared round the corner of the chapel a great wheelbarrow, and two girls laughing. The wheelbarrow was full of hymn-books. The girls stopped when they saw us and dropped the handles of the barrow and turned to each other. Face to face they both exploded and spat out laughter again and I knew that they were laughing at us.
‘Will you come on this way?’ said the tooth-picker with a sketchy dip of the head, and Aunt Mary and I were removed into the house where, in the vastest and coldest of marble drawing-rooms, sat some semi-transparent bones with black silk hung on them. Lady Vipont sat looking out at the ashy terrace and the ashy sky.
‘Mary dear—and the little one. Polly—Emma’s Polly!’
Aunt Mary sat on a gold chair covered in gold satin, shredding here and there. From between the shreds bulged grubby stuffing originally placed there by eighteenth-century fingers. I stood behind this chair.
‘May Polly join the children, Lavinia?’
‘Children?’
‘There were children in the courtyard. With a barrow full of hymn-books.’
‘Oh my dear Mary, no! Not hymn-books!’
‘They were unmistakable.’
‘Not hymn-books,’ said the upright glassy little lady to the two girls who then came in to the room—a bronzy girl and a silvery girl. Behind them there seemed to be the shadow of a boy. A gawk.
‘Delphi—what is this about the wheelbarrow?’
‘It’s for fires. They’re no use. They’re all mouldering. They’ve got mushroom-spores flying out of them. They make you wheeze.’
‘Now Delphi, who told you to take the hymn-books?’
‘Commonsense did. If we don’t use them for fires we’ve got nothing. Nothing till the trees are felled and who’s to do that? We’ll wait till they fall. You’ll freeze this winter. And they’re foul hymn-books. We never use them.’
‘This is Polly. Polly Flint. This is Delphi and her two little friends from er. Off you all go and play.’
I went in my draggle of heavy clothes, my regimental gaiters and weighted boots, slowly, one step at a time behind the big girls who ran ahead of me, laughing.
The shadowy boy in the background seemed to give off a sort of friendliness, but outside he called, ‘I have to go now,’ and disappeared. ‘We’ll be in the mausoleum,’ called one of the girls—the bronzy one with red hair, ‘after we’ve got another load.’ She had strong, short arms and she bent to the wheelbarrow in which the silvery girl was sitting holding its sides and they ran shrieking over the cobbles, past all the stable-doors with their rickety hinges. ‘Stop,’ called the girl in the barrow at the steps of the round building and rose carefully, gracefully to her feet. She was tall and narrow. She stepped deftly out.
‘She’s Delphi, I’m Rebecca. Rebecca Zeit,’ said the bronzy one. ‘Hello, child. We’re stealing hymn-books from the chapel.’
‘The awful chapel,’ said Delphi. ‘Grandmother’s chapel. Full of dead birds and coffin-stools and terrible echoes and broken stoves.’
‘We’re going to light the stoves. And we’re going to look at dead ancestors. Do you want to come and look at dead ancestors? Delphi—could we bring our tea out here? To the mausoleum?’
‘If you like.’
‘Would they let us?’
‘If I say so. I’ll go and tell them.’ She was gone.
‘What’s a—what you said?’ I asked the red-haired girl Rebecca.
‘Mausoleum? It’s where dead people are put if they’re important enough and all in the same family. Come and see.’
‘I don’t want to see dead people.’
‘It’s only statues. The skeletons are all under the floor. Come on—it’s very unusual.’
‘No, I’d rather just look about outside.’
‘Look about inside. Don’t you want to have a new experience?’
‘No.’
‘Delphi—she daren’t come in. Make her come in.’
Delphi, coming back, passed me however without a glance. She was a tall girl, very spare, white-blonde, not exactly smiling. Her hair and legs were very long and she had no eyebrows or lashes but a heavy mouth and broad, shiny eyelids. There was a flimsy, brittle look about her as if she never went into the sun. She was like a pressed flower.
As she went by and up the mausoleum steps with her hands full of food she turned funny flat eyes on me—huge. She laughed but did nothing to urge me to follow her.
‘Why is there no tea? Tea to drink?’ the Rebecca girl was complaining, and I looked in through the doors, then leaned, awkward against the door-post and saw Delphi arranging hefty jam-sandwiches and slabs of seed-cake along the top of a tomb. I thought, ‘A guest ordering things when she’s out to tea!’ I remember thinking how dreadful if they ever came to tea at Oversands.
‘Too long,’ said Delphi. ‘Can’t wait. We’ll have water. You—what’s your name? Polly—go and get some water out of that horse-trough.’
‘What do I put it in?’
‘Use your head.’
‘I can’t use my head—’
But the pale flat eyes did not smile, so I wandered off and found a bucket and dipped it in the trough and brought it into the mausoleum, totteringly.
‘She’s brought it—look,’ I heard Rebecca say and Delphi turned round and stared. They both collapsed again with laughter. ‘Clear spring-water for tea,’ Delphi said. ‘What a clever little girl! But shouldn’t she wash the floor with it?’
‘No, stop it Delphi,’ said Rebecca, and I wanted to cry because I was listening to a foreign language I couldn’t understand and knew that they felt their power. ‘Go on—wash the floor, wash the floor—see if she can bend in the—oh lor!—the gaiters.’
And that is all I remember of the visit. Just that—and a hateful memory of wetness and paddly black water running over marble. On one of the tombs I remember a bottle of horse liniment cocooned in cobwebs with some marble roses and the head of a cherub. I must have looked up above their heads because I heard, ‘Oh my! We’re very haughty,’ and I think I saw a tall, high dome with heraldic emblems in the plaster dropping flakes of blue and gold and scarlet turned to old rose pink, like flakes of coloured snow. And the inside of the dome’s plaster was woven with swallows’ nests and droppings were splattered. Near a broken pane a clump of harebells flourished and in the dome itself was a great and horrible crack stuffed with dangles of roots from the greenery growing above on the roof. Quite a sizable, cobwebby silver-birch was sprouting behind a marble man dressed only in sheets.
‘Did you have a nice time with the children?’ Aunt Mary asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘What a pretty girl, little Delphi. She’ll be a great beauty. It’s difficult for beauties.’
‘She’s not a beauty now,’ I said. ‘She’s very ugly indeed.’
‘What dear? Well, I’m sure you looked very nice, too. And so good.’
I came in off the salt-marsh one day soon after my twelfth birthday with my hands full of flowers and grasses. I had found some sea milkwort and Aunt Mary was delighted. We were making a hortus siccus and I think at that moment she felt I was her own. ‘Oh Polly!’ she said. ‘How lovely! And soon you’re to be Confirmed.’
‘No.’
The word rang round the study and bounced off Archdeacon Younghusband’s face. It left him with a stunned look, reflected in my aunt’s and in my own.
‘No?’
‘No, Aunt Mary.’
‘But my dear child, why?’
‘I—Just no, thank you.’
‘But whyever not?’
I did not know whyever not but I knew that the answer was no.
‘Is it Father Pocock? Don’t you like Father Pocock?’
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br /> I had not thought about it, but considering now I found that this was so. But it was not the reason.
‘It’s not Father Pocock,’ I said. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I don’t want to be Confirmed.’
‘Don’t say awfully dear unless it is in the accurate sense which I fear it is not. Do you feel that you are too young? Father Pocock could speak to you about that. What’s that?’
I looked at the carpet.
‘I just said, “How? He couldn’t change it.”’
‘Change it?’
‘My age. Twelve’s twelve.’
‘Nearly thirteen. He could speak to you of Grace.’
I stared ahead at the books. The matter rested.
Every few months however it was dragged alive again, and each time not I but some other girl answered, ‘No.’
‘I’m sorry to be so rotten,’ I said.
‘Don’t say rotten, Polly. It means decayed. Have you truly thought about this? About salvation? You have heard so many wonderful sermons. You have lived for six years in this house.’
‘Yes. And it’s no. I’m terribly sorry.’
I prickled with fear and triumph every time. I was like a new tennis-player facing a champion and whamming back the ball where she couldn’t reach it.
‘Confirmed, Polly—’
‘No!’
‘No. Aunt Mary, I’m terribly—’
‘Don’t say terribly dear. It is not appropriate to penitence unless you are using it in the Greek sense, meaning large, which is obsolete now. Come let us say a prayer together and then we’ll read some Tennyson.’
Confirmed I would not be.
‘Is it because of the smells?’ asked Charlotte in the kitchen. The old ladies were all out visiting the nunnery. The Rood. The kitchen was hot and I was sleepy after being on the marsh all afternoon. Charlotte was boiling up her knickers in a big black pan on the fire and I was looking drowsily at the pan and thinking ‘Holy Rude’—and feeling wicked. Guilt lurked all over the yellow house.
‘Smells,’ said Charlotte. ‘Incense. Sundays.’
‘Oh no. I love the incense.’
Sunday was the day of processions. The first one was at seven-thirty in the morning when my aunts and Mrs Woods gathered silently in the hall and then over the marsh they went to church. At nine o’clock they processed back for the glory of the week—breakfast, for on Sunday we had coffee.
This coffee was the one glamorous event in our lives and it was excellent, for Mrs Woods’ dead husband had been in coffee in Africa and she was very much a specialist. The coffee was sent by rail to her in person from London, and she paid for it. Perhaps it was her rent, for my aunts would have never thought of asking for any money from her, since she was, we were told, ‘in total penury’.
Mrs Woods made the coffee herself and carried the pot from the kitchen herself and there was a great deal of stirring and pausing and peering and sniffing and sedate smacking of lips before the three other large cups of it were poured and passed.
I adored the coffee. It meant primary colours to me, and glorious sunshine, though how I knew it did I don’t know, except that I suppose I had begun to learn something from the archdeacon’s globes in the study, and of islands and tropical shores, and coral reefs from any sea-faring book I could find. Africa was beginning to sound desirably wild. ‘Coffee is where Woods excelled,’ said his widow as we kept a reverent silence.
Colour and heat.
Try as I might, I couldn’t associate Mr Woods with colour and heat or with anything that was not decidedly pale and chill. Transparent, I imagined Mr Woods, an amoeba, an emergent tadpole. The darkness which surrounded Mrs Woods, one felt, must have soaked him up. She had taken me to see his grave once—very small and lonely in the superior part of the new church’s graveyard. It was a particularly small grave decorated with an upturned glass blancmange-dish. Inside the dish was a wreath of everlasting roses made out of what seemed to be candle-grease. ‘Woods,’ she had said stoicly, pointing at the dish, and I saw him small and helpless before the cutting edge of her will, comforted only by his coffee, longing for the gaudy forest. I hoped he’d found coffee in heaven.
After breakfast came procession number two—and hat, coat, gloves, prayer-book, gaiters, sober face. At half past ten away we went, with me following this time behind, for I was allowed to the eleven o’clock service as it was Sung, and only the very holiest of the priests—Mr Pocock—actually received the Communion. I sat as good as the rest, and to look at me you’d never have guessed that I was un-Confirmed.
Eleven o’clock.
Incense.
Greek and solemn music, an hour-long sermon and a sort of tribal dance in the wind at the church-door with Father Pocock bending about towards us all and all of us bending about towards him. Laughter and little hand-shakes. Big stupid smiles. Guilt at disdain. Then home over the marsh again—no guilt there. No guilt ever on the marsh, just joy. And then Sunday dinner.
And the great blast of it through the blue and red glass of the vestibule door: the beef and the minted potatoes, the riches of gravy, the knock-out blow of the cabbage.
Then the duff. Charlotte called it a duff, the aunts called it a steamed sponge. Mrs Woods called it ‘very indigestible’. The duff held the shape of the basin and jam or sometimes chocolate sauce ran down its sides. It always came in the yellow jug with the dazzling parrots on it filled with yellow custard. The jug made me think of my father. I never knew why. I loved it.
After which we all retired to our rooms, though I don’t think Aunt Mary slept. I think she knelt at her prie-dieu because I saw her there once through the door when Charlotte went round at four o’clock with the reviving cups of tea. Aunt Mary knelt tall, her skin waxy. She still wore her white cap with the ribbon under the chin. The room was always so cold that the drop on the end of her nose might well have been frozen there.
Then, at five-thirty, procession number three for Evensong, and I went to this, too, after a ceremonial locking of the house; for this service—it was the ‘servants’ service’—Charlotte also attended, leaving ten minutes ahead of us by the back door and sitting with some other maids in the gallery. She returned by herself, too, rather later than us, for she was allowed time off on Sunday evening, so long as she had put ready the supper properly on the sideboard—cold beef, cold duff, cold custard—and we helped ourselves, sometimes kindly carrying through the dishes for her to wash up.
Then I went to my room to do my preparation for Aunt Mary’s and Mrs Woods’ lessons tomorrow. And then I went to bed.
At nine I heard Charlotte creak up the attic stairs and cross the boarded floor above me and the bedsprings twang above the crusts. Then the three ladies came to bed—first Mrs Woods and Aunt Frances who often talked together at the turn of the stairs at the end of my little corridor—Mrs Woods sharply, and once or twice I heard Aunt Frances crying.
Then Aunt Mary’s slow feet followed, and a clonking noise against the banisters because she always brought up as bedfellows the silver spoons. Burglars are not meant to take spoons out of bedrooms.
And then I watched the mandarin if it were light enough, and listened to the sea and the wind over the marsh until I fell asleep.
When I was still twelve, not yet quite thirteen, one particular Sunday in March, we had embarked upon our journey over the marsh for the eleven o’clock service when I saw an angel. It was a huge gold man looking at me from the tower on the unfinished house.
First there was the flash of light off its wings which were curved over its head like a boat and enclosed a halo which was translucent and rose-pink. Then the clouds flew across the sun and it was gone.
I turned from it and looked back towards the sea. ‘Just ordinary,’ I said; ‘an ordinary morning,’ and I held my arms out on either side and became a bird for a time. When I said that there wasn’t a thing Father Pocock could do about my age I had spoken wisdom, for ages merge. Twelve is not too old to be a bird, and I knew that Mrs Woods who thought
otherwise, stomping in front of me, would never turn her head once it was launched towards the Eucharist.
‘I’m just playing about,’ I told the marsh and walked backwards for a time and put my boot into a pool up to the ankle and felt it being sucked down in the rushes. I pulled it out and watched the hole it had made close over with a slap. ‘Now there’ll be a to-do,’ I said to the boot—again aloud so that the angel upon the folly might take note that everyday things must go on.
Anyway it was probably a trick of the light.
I looked again at the unfinished house and there seemed only to be some sort of machine on its tower, probably a pulley for the new slates.
‘Angels, how ridiculous!’ I said and continued playing birds up to the lych-gate. I let all three of my earthly guardians vanish into the dark porch before I followed them because of the boot. The final quick bell was beating like a heart, saying hurry hurry, it’s almost beginning. Then it stopped, which meant there—you’ve done it now! You’re late.
An excited, wicked, pleasant feeling usually swept over me when this happened, which wasn’t often—today there had been some serious matter about a leaky hot-water bottle in Mrs Woods’s muff which had damped her. I heard the organ give its first cry and stepped in towards the dark, thinking ‘Two hours—two whole hours of life going to waste,’ and turned back again to say goodbye to the fresh air.
From the roof-top the angel regarded me again—huge and firm and gold. He shone with comprehension and strength and I knew that he loved me and was on my side.
So that at lunch-time later that day I said that I wouldn’t be able to go to church in the evening. Or probably again. Ever.
We had reached the duff. It was what Charlotte called a nice marmalade and the custard was extra thick. ‘Particularly delicious,’ Aunt Mary had said of her three small saintly bites.
Six eyes looked at me over their helpings and Aunt Mary said, ‘You are not well, Polly. You haven’t eaten your pudding.’ It happened that I did have rather a pain but I said, ‘I am well. But I am afraid that I can’t go to Evensong.’
